Eighty years after World War II, Okinawa and Taiwan remember the war in vastly different ways. Okinawa still bears deep physical and emotional scars from a brutal ground battle, while Taiwan, though also under Japanese rule at the time, was spared an invasion. Historians say Okinawan civilians suffered immense casualties, caught between Japanese military orders to resist and massive U.S. bombardment. In contrast, Taiwan watched the war’s final battles from afar, leaving people to wonder how differently history might have unfolded if the fighting had reached their shores.
00:00Eighty years after the Battle of Okinawa, the memories of World War II are fading in Taiwan.
00:17But on the Japanese island, its scars remain part of daily life, cut into the landscape and people's memories.
00:26Okinawa natives filter through our lines. Although long a part of Tokyo's domain, the Japs treated them as an inferior race.
00:33Not at all warlike, they seem grateful for American kindness.
00:37The U.S. Army, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Army, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Army, the U.S. Army.
00:48Okinawa was the last and largest land battle fought on Japanese home soil.
00:54Japanese troops were ordered to fight to the death, and Okinawan civilians conscripted as medics,
01:01defense workers even used as human shields for the brunt of Japan's final defense tactics.
01:08The Okinawans, an ethnically vague race of Japanese nationals, are by no means antagonistic.
01:15But as they number close to 300,000, the security and health of our forces make them a definite military problem in the operation.
01:23Civilians had it the worst of pretty much anybody. You have tens of thousands of Okinawans who are killed in the crossfire, who were killed especially in a lot of cave fighting.
01:34At around 100,000 civilians dead, estimates placed the death toll at between a quarter and a third of the island's wartime population.
01:43And just across the sea, Taiwan, then still under Japanese rule, watched from afar. Spared invasion, but not the war.
01:53The sea and airport city of Naha, what was soon to develop into a drawn out siege, opens with intense bombardment of the approaches to the city.
02:18Taiwan is saved from, unlike Okinawa, from a horrific land battle.
02:25Had there been a massive land battle in Taiwan, as there was late in the war on Okinawa,
02:31I think we would have seen a very different reaction by Taiwanese.
02:34At the time of Japan, if you were to die, if you were to die, if you were to die, if you were to die, if you were to die, if you were to die.
02:46Powerful tank flamethrowers blast enemy caves on strategic sawtooth ridge near Naha.
02:52Newsreel, Signal Corps, and Marine Cameraman risked their lives to film the furious action near Sugarloaf, Connacle and Chocolate Drop Hills, and other cave-entrenched Jap positions.
03:03The tradition for many was, of course, to go to their family caves during times of crisis.
03:08Well, those are fighting positions too.
03:10And the Americans can't really distinguish between one or the other, between who is who at times.
03:15Satchel charges are used to blast many of the Japanese defenders from their underground emplacements.
03:21While Okinawa was devastated, Taiwan got through the war comparatively unscathed.
03:28On the dayliest day of the war in Taiwan, an American air raid on Taipei killed 3,000.
03:35By comparison, the firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed as many as 100,000 people in a single night.
03:46Along with human bones and equipment, Okinawans uncover hundreds of pieces of unexploded ordnance each year,
03:54compared to just two or three major finds a year in Taiwan.
03:59There is also the fact that U.S. forces who landed on Okinawa in April 1945 never truly left.
04:21Today, the island hosts 70% of all U.S. military facilities in Japan,
04:27a reality that could once again place its people on the front lines in a potential conflict over the Taiwan Strait.
04:35For Okinawans, like many people in mainland Japan, the war was rock bottom.
04:54Things began to improve after the empire's defeat.
05:07But in Taiwan, it was the post-war years that cast the longest shadow.
05:13Food shortages, a new regime, massacres, and decades of martial law.
05:19For time when we come to the Party of Tokyo, we would have to pay for our money.
05:27We want to pay for money.
05:28Because because of the Party of Tokyo, the human lives are so poor.
05:31In Japan when we come to the Party of Tokyo, we keep our money.
05:36Because of the Party of Tokyo is the amount of money that we get through.
05:40We're not paying for money.
05:41We do not pay for a better job.
05:44Eighty years after World War II, Okinawa still hosts the bulk of U.S. forces in Japan,
05:50and Taiwan now finds itself at the center of rising tensions with China.
05:56For both islands, history is more than memory.
06:00It's a reminder that the next conflict could again hit close to home.
06:05James Lin, Ed Moon, Bryn Thomas, and Jeffrey Chen for Taiwan Plus.
